Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1887-06-04
NATURES FREAKS.
Australians Grotesque Botany and Ecccn-
trio Zoology.

Australians Grotesque Botany and Ecccn-
trio Zoology.
A discovery has recently been made in
| the Wellington Caves of New South Wales
which might well be described, in the lam
| guage of Mr.. Swiveller, as " a startler and
staggerer" for all paleontologists. The
| trouvaille in question consists of two or
three very complete jawbones of some large
prediluvial animal, the teeth especially be-
ing in an excellent state of preservation
They resemble the remains of no living
creature at present roaming over the scrub
or the fern-clad mountains in the great
| island-continent. Local savants incline to
regard them as indicative of one of the large
carnivora, and the best and boldest opinions
| did not fear to proclaim that these jawbones
| resembled the dental system ard general
outlines of those of the lion. But the king
| OF the forestswas never supposed hitherto
to have inhabited. in any shape or at any
date, New South Wales or any other part of
Australia.
The largest beast of prey at present roam
| ing over the pastures and thickets of the
country is the dingo, or native dog-an an
imal as handsome as he is predatory and
| Unsuitable, which kill the settlers sheep by
hundreds, and is slain, in return wherever
encountered. The rest of the existing fauna
| of Australia is well known to be as gro
| tesque as its botany. Everybody is aware
| how extraordinary that is, with clumps of
shocks, or she-oaks, which have for their
foliage hair instead of leaves; with gum
trees. or eucalypti; and strange fruit trees
! OF which the last amaze By their vagaries.
while the first grows to so prodigious a
hight, and produces a powerful febrifuge,
and, moreover, instead of shedding its
leaves periodically, drops its bark, its
mighty t1raioino
areas of the soil, and thus preventing ma
laria.
In the dry wilderness of the land grow
quantities of amaranths, with shining
white and yellow blossoms. which seem in
dependent of water, like those mysterious
vegetables of the Arabian and Egyptian
deserts-the ice plant and the wild melon
which, in the most arid spots, overspread
the sand with leaves, seemingly covered
with frosted dew, and with fresh green and
silvery globes which seem so tempting, but
are bitter and poisonous. Australia, in
fact, with its grotesque botany and eccen-
trio zoology, has always been looked upon
by naturalists as a sort of out house of Ma
ture. where, utterly undisturbed and uu-
approached by the vegetation and animal
life of other regions, except, perhaps, to
the northward and across the Arafura sea
she has amused the prodigious leisure of
her pleistocene ages in wild experiments
Besides the dingo, already mentioned,
which is something between a dog and a
yellow woif, she has there conceived and
constructed the remarkable varieties OF
kangaroos and wallabies, which bear
scarcely any resemblance to the rest of her
animal world.
In the forks of her giganticgum-tree she
has hidden the opossum, and in the clefts
of the gold-bearing rocks the comical but
pugnacious wombat. On her lakes and
creeks in Australia, still in a mood of
irony and extravaganza, she set her black
swans swimming tens of thousands of
years before the Latin. poet had spoken of
such beings as an utter and obvious impos-
sibility. Over the rolling downs of that
vast land, and the plains covered with
Towering scrub, she turned her emus
loose, clad, like no other bird, in bristles
instead of feathers, and sitting on stony
nests full of dark-green eggs. In the par
rots, the cockntoos, the small birds, snakes
and insects of this her antipodeap retreat
Nature has had the air of keeping the vast
island as an atelier of all sorts of creative
experiments, some of which turned out
well, and were successfully transplanted,
like the opossum. to distant continents
while of some she herself has seemed posi-
lively ashamed. reproducing them never
again. Nowhere else has she allowed us to
discover congener of that odd invention,
the ornithorhyncus platypus, which has
the beak of duck, the body of an otter,
the tail of squirrel, the spurs of a cock,
which swims like a fish, burrows like a
water-rat, has web-feet like a water-fo fowl
and lays eggs like a turtle.
Nature has perpetrated all these amazing
eccentricities in her Australasian studio,
and she has, besides. contrived some quaint
Il - 81
Nobody, however, would have expected
that anything in the shape of a lion ever
roamed the scrub, which hundred years
ago was traversed only by the degraded
aboriginal black man. The relics from the
Wellington cavern were sent over to Eng
land to be submitted for an authoritative
opinion to Sir Richard Owen. That most
learned professor, as is well known, needs
only to inspect the tooth of an animal,
even though it be primeyal and wholly ex-
tinct, to gather from the size and character
of molars, lncsors and the rest the precise
nature of the creature to which the fossil
belonged.
Again and again, in his erudite career, he
has thus Iriumphantly foretold from a
single tooth or & vertebra what the rest of
the vanished animal must and would have
been. and some later discovery has turned
up the entire skeleton Just IS the professor
predicted it. He knows how to repeople
by scientific Imagination the swamps and
solitudes of the early world with all those
monstrous and hideous creatures which
once roamed over the untitled earth, and
disputed its sovereignty with that poor
soft fOrked thing called man, who was,
nevertheless. destined to win the battle for
supremacy because he could oppose the tins
of his finger and thumb. To Sir Richard,
| therefore, went these fossil relics from New
South Wales, and he at once declared them
to be indeed fragments Of veritable lion,
as large as any at present existing, whose
midnight roar to-day rolls thunderously in
the jungle of Africa. He considers, how
ever that the extinct beast was specialized
in Australia by possessing the marsupium,
or pouch, which is the distinctive mark OF
so many animals there.
The least intelligent naturalist will be
we'll aware that the female kangaroo pro-
duces her young i'll an unfinished condi-
ton, and instantly transfers them, blind
and Informed, to sort of apron pocket
, , which she wears upon her stomach. There
the little creatures nestle down, and, fast
ening their mouth upon the mothers teats,
help themselves to the maternal susten-
ance whenever, like Mrs. Camp, they feel
$50 disposed" 1t is one of the prettiest
sights of the Australian forests to see these
lltllc BeiuSS tdht refuge III tue ldlilllldT
pouch when the mother is suddenly dis
| turbed, and one of the most pathetic to
watch her, when chased, at the moment of
departing strength, mournfully remove her
offspring from their place of refuge, while
she bounds away with her eyes turned back
towards the cruel dogs.
We know that the gigantic moa wandered
over the valleys of New Zealand down
to compare i've recent date. There are
legends among the Maoris that that i'm
mense bird, matched with which an ostrich
is but small affair, has been deserted
century or two ago, stalking among the
tree ferns of the Middle Island What
tremendous sensation it would be for s2or.s-
men to come upon either of these enormous
experiments OF nature There exist vast
unirodden tracks in both lands, but espe
cially in Australia. which may conceiyably
contain all kinds of astounding secrets of
the natural world.-L0ld0n Telegraph
MANS inhumanity to woman makes
countless thousands mourn, would be an
applicable rendering of Pope's line, in view
of the indignities she has suffered and
pains undergone at the hands of unskiliful
physicians and quacks. Naturally modest